It has been a month since the Indiana Senate decided to send a bill to expand mass transit in Marion and Hamilton counties to a summer study committee.

It has been a quiet month. But in that time, many people have asked: What exactly are they going to “study,” given that Hoosiers have been studying how transit could work here for the past 30 years?

Late last week, I got the first inkling of an answer -- and it’s not good.

You see, Sen. Brent Waltz, R-Greenwood, has come up with a transit plan of his own. Or as he prefers to call it, “a comprehensive, multidimensional transportation solution.” (Try saying that five times fast.)

Here’s what he wants to do:

First up is fixing the weekday traffic congestion in northern Marion County and southern Hamilton County. To do this, he suggests building two or three “commuter corridors.”

What’s a commuter corridor? I’m glad you asked.

Think about Binford Boulevard with its two lanes of fast-moving traffic on each side of a wide, grassy median. Now imagine the median is a bus rapid transit line. Now imagine Binford with three to four lanes of traffic on each side, plus a bus rapid transit line in the middle. Now imagine if that souped-up Binford was College Avenue or Capitol Avenue or Michigan Road, running from the heart of Downtown Indianapolis up into Hamilton County. This, Waltz says, will convince car-loving suburbanites to fund transit. It’s a “value proposition.”

At this point, I hope you’re as horrified as I am. But let’s move on.

The second step in Waltz’s plan calls for creating a bus rapid transit system throughout Indianapolis. He wants it to be a system of “nodes,” which is kind of like a glorified bus stop.

He suggests these nodes could be installed at local destinations, such as the University of Indianapolis, The Children’s Museum, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, various malls and so on. The advantage of doing it this is way would be to cut costs. So, for example, the University of Indianapolis would take on the cost of building its node so taxpayers wouldn’t have to.

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I should note that this isn’t too far off from what’s already in the Indy Connect plan, minus the sponsorship of stops or nodes.

Third, Waltz wants to reform IndyGo. He says we should bring in transportation experts and ask them, “If you were to start a transit system from scratch, how would you do it?”

I’ll also note that talking to transportation experts, as well as residents, is how a lot of the Indy Connect plan was drawn up in the first place. And that plan does call for doubling IndyGo bus service.

Details, details.

Waltz wants the summer study committee to use his plan as the starting point, not the locally created Indy Connect plan that made it through the Indiana House this year. Whether that will actually happen is anyone’s guess at this point.

The Senate hasn’t formed its summer committees yet and it’s unclear if Waltz will be a member of the one handling transit. So far, though, he says he has shopped the plan around the Statehouse and the response from his colleagues has been “favorable.”

That’s the scariest thing of all.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the proper role of the state in local affairs. How much should cities like Indianapolis be micromanaged by the Indiana General Assembly and the governor?

The fact that Waltz, whose district covers the southern portion of Marion County, came up with this plan at all is telling. His commuter corridors run afoul of everything neighborhood associations and community development officials have been doing for the last 10 years.

In almost every plan dreamed up by an urban core neighborhood, residents have pushed for making their streets more walkable and bikeable. They don’t want “commuter corridors” turning the Northside into raceways for cars. If anything, there’s a push to eliminate the raceways we already have. Traffic-calming medians and raingardens are going in, and one-way streets are slowly but surely being phased out.

And the results are showing. Neighborhoods, many of them on the Near Northside, are getting better. But a state lawmaker, even one who lives in Central Indiana, probably isn’t going to be aware of that.

So you get people like Waltz who, when asked about the impact on those neighborhoods by his commuter corridors, said with a straight face: “I took a drive up College just to see. Most of the houses are abandoned.”

For the record, most of the houses on College Avenue (even south of East 38th Street) are not abandoned.

I understand that the General Assembly, as Waltz explained, “has no interest in writing a blank check” for transit (which isn’t being asked of them either, but that’s another story), but there’s a fine line between being a responsible elected official and being an irresponsible micro-manager.

Waltz has crossed that line. Let’s hope the rest of the Senate doesn’t follow suit.